Colbie Caillat interview

interview by Bill Palmer

The release of Colbie Caillat’s debut album two years ago was just one step in her gradual rise to popularity that at the time had her opening for other artists and building a steadily growing fanbase that was still unsure of quite how to pronounce her last name. But with her highly anticipated sophomore album Breakthrough having just debuted at #1 this morning in iTunes, and scheduled appearances on everything from the Today Show to the Tonight Show before this week is over, one might be tempted to conclude that the demands on her time for the launch of this album are more burdensome than the last. But not so, Colbie tells me, as she chats with me on a Friday morning from her Malibu home.



“It was actually the other way around,” she says of gearing up for the release of Breakthrough, “because with Coco, I didn’t know anything about this business. I didn’t know everything that was going to be coming up, the touring and the schedule, and interviews and TV. All of that was a surprise to me. And now, I know what I went through for those two years of promoting my record, and now I’m prepared for it for this time around, and know what to expect.”



Knowing what’s coming also makes for a more relaxed mindset. “I feel like I know my job now. I know what to do, instead of being terrified and not sure of what to say or what was going to be coming up on the schedule. Now I just know what I’m supposed to do every day, and it’s a lot easier for me.”



Breakthrough sees a mix of existing Coco-era collaborators and outsiders, with the new and old working together in some instances, including a multi-week songwriting retreat to Hawaii that included longtime cowriter Jason Reeves (“he’s like my brother”) and American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi. “We rented this house on the beach and we wrote songs every day and lived life, and talked about everything that we were going through and wrote about it.”



“The three of us got along so well. It was just nothing but good times and writing great songs together. It was a blast.”



If every aspect of Breakthrough sounds like a more mature product, it’s no accident. “Coco was the younger side of me, and what I wrote about a few years ago, what I was going through in my life. The production on the record was all I knew the production could be at that point. And now over the years, I’ve learned myself. My voice has gotten stronger, I’ve taken notes on songwriting and tried different ways of going about it. And with production styles I just wanted a fuller sound, and make it more complex and diverse, and just experiment with this record.”



The twenty-four year old who two years ago penned the lyric “it’s kinda tough getting older” now sees things differently. “It’s actually fun getting older,” she says. “I think the older you get, the more you know about life, and the more you learn about yourself and you become comfortable in your own skin. So the older I’m getting, the more fun I’m having.”

But not all of the songs on Breakthrough are necessarily written from her own perspective. The R&B-tinged “Fearless” is written from the viewpoint of a guy she broke up with, based on “how I broke his heart but he’s still gonna be fearless when it comes to love in future relationships.” Another song ‘Breakthrough’ is written from the perspective of a friend who hadn’t spoken to her father in years.



While Colbie’s original hit single “Bubbly” two years ago was about an imaginary Mr. Right, her current single “Fallin’ For You” is a similar sentiment directed at a real life guy, with some of the lyrics coming literally from actual experiences. “He and I were on the dance floor, he was just my friend, and all the sudden the moment he grabbed my hand, I noticed that I was falling in love with him and he wasn’t just a friend anymore.”



Whether the songs about real life experiences have happy endings or not, there’s no fear of the subject of the song hearing it and realizing it’s about them. “I actually look forward to playing them to the person, and having people hear them and being able to relate to them and that situation that I went through. Songwriting is like a therapy, it’s a connection that you have with another person, and I’m not scared of it at all for some reason.”



With the album having had multiple producers (including Colbie’s father and veteran producer Ken Caillat), Breakthrough turned out to be an exercise in contrasting methodologies. With Rick Nowels, who produced Fallin’ For You, “we started out writing songs with a beat behind it, with this fun drum beat, and then he’d add on guitars and add on bass, and we had a production direction. And with my dad, we did a full-on live recording, so we had all the top musicians that we’d been working with come in, and we all had our own booths in the studio. I was in the vocal booth, and we would start the song and we would all record it live together, like we were playing a show.”



As far as working in the studio with her dad and being told what to do by her own father, “He would come up with ideas and most of the time I would agree with him. And if I wouldn’t agree I would still listen, because it’s always worth a try. Like why not try adding this instrument, and if we don’t like it, it doesn’t have to stay. So I would listen to him, and he would listen to me on certain ideas on whether the song needed to be more stripped down and have less instruments on it, and we really worked together well.”



Except for one particular instance where “I wasn’t paying attention, I was talking with one of the musicians when I was supposed to be in the vocal booth, and he comes out and he’s like ‘Colbie Marie Caillat, get your butt in that vocal booth!’ And I was so embarrassed, I was like dad, I can’t believe that you did that. But that was the only one time that I was embarrassed by him, and otherwise it’s great working with him because any other producer wants to go home by eight o’clock because they want to spend time with their family. My family was there with me. My mom came, we brought our dog, my friends were there. It was like that was our life, we had no other place to be. So we put our all into it. So working with my dad was the best experience.”



Of the unusually large number of bonus tracks included with the deluxe version of Breakthrough, “It was difficult choosing the songs for the record because I wrote so many.”

Breakthrough is available in iTunes now. Learn more at ColbieCaillat.com